Tobermory, short story by Saki, published in the 1911 collection The Chronicles of Clovis. This miniature masterpiece about a cool and malicious talking cat who threatens to reveal secrets he has heard at a country partysatirizes the pretensions and hypocrisies of Edwardian society. Written in supple prose, this once much-anthologized story epitomizes its author’s witty, derisive, and slightly cruel style.

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Dec. 18, 1870 Akyab, Burma [now Myanmar] Nov. 14, 1916 near Beaumont-Hamel, France Scottish writer and journalist whose stories depict the Edwardian social scene with a flippant wit and power of fantastic invention used both to satirize social pretension, unkindness, and stupidity and to create an...

artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform.